In His Time

If I could sit across from my twenty-year-old self today, perhaps somewhere over coffee, I think she would arrive carrying a lot of questions. She always had questions. She would probably want to know whether everything worked out, whether the dreams she kept quietly carrying eventually happened, whether the prayers she whispered when nobody was listening were answered, and whether the things she worried about so intensely turned out to be worth all those sleepless nights. Knowing her, she would probably want dates too. Exact ones. She would want reassurance that by a certain age everything would finally fall perfectly into place. I don’t think I would give her any of those answers.

I wouldn’t tell her about the places she would eventually see, the people she would meet, the doors that would unexpectedly open, or the dreams that would take much longer than she wanted. I wouldn’t warn her about every disappointment either. Some things have to be lived before their meaning can be understood. If I told her the ending, perhaps she would spend too much time trying to avoid the difficult chapters, not knowing that some of them would eventually become the chapters that shaped her most. I think I would simply look at her and say, Trust God a little more, and worry a little less. She probably wouldn’t listen. At least, not immediately.

Twenty-year-old me liked timelines. I had an invisible schedule for life, although I don’t remember anyone actually giving it to me. I simply seemed to believe it existed. By this age, something should happen. By that age, I should have achieved something else. Education should lead neatly into career. Career should lead somewhere better. Dreams should happen if you worked hard enough. Prayers should eventually receive answers that looked reasonably similar to what you asked for. Life, unfortunately, had never agreed to any of these terms. I just hadn’t realised it yet.

Back then, every delay felt suspiciously like failure. A closed door felt personal. An unanswered prayer sometimes felt like rejection. I would look ahead and repeatedly ask the same question in different forms. When will this happen? When will that prayer be answered? When will the opportunity come? When will everything finally make sense? There is something exhausting about constantly living in when. You can spend so much time waiting for your life to begin that you fail to notice it has been happening around you the entire time.

I understand that differently now. At twenty, waiting felt like nothing was happening. Looking back, I realise some of the most important things in my life were happening precisely when I thought nothing was. That is the strange thing about God’s timing. We tend to recognise it only afterwards. While we are inside the waiting, it rarely feels profound. It just feels long.

There were dreams I carried for years. Some became heavier the longer I held them. There were opportunities I prayed for that never came. There were plans I arranged carefully only to watch them fall apart with almost insulting efficiency. There were times when I genuinely thought I knew what would be best for my life, presented the plan to God in prayer, and apparently expected Him to approve it without amendments. He did not. Instead, I found myself asking questions I rarely said aloud. Why is this taking so long? Why does it seem easier for everyone else? Why am I still here? I suspect many people have asked God versions of the same questions.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest parts of faith. Believing in God is one thing. Trusting Him when His answer does not resemble what we wanted is something else entirely. It is easy to speak about God’s timing after the prayer has been answered. It is easy to say everything happens for a reason when we are already standing on the other side of the reason. Faith feels very different when nothing is moving, when everyone around you seems to be receiving good news while you are still waiting, when you have prayed so many times that you no longer know what else to say, and when you have done everything you believe you are supposed to do but the door remains closed anyway. Those are the seasons when trust stops being something beautiful we say and becomes something difficult we practise.

Faith is easy to recognise in answered prayers; sometimes its deepest form is simply continuing to trust while heaven remains quiet.

I wish I could tell my twenty-year-old self that silence does not necessarily mean absence. She would need to learn that slowly. So did I. The older I become, the more I can look backwards and see that some delays were doing work I could not see while I was living through them. Sometimes circumstances were changing. Sometimes people were being placed where they needed to be. Sometimes opportunities simply did not exist yet. And sometimes the person who was not ready was me.

That last one is harder to admit because we like to think we are always ready for the things we ask God for. Of course I am ready. Send the blessing immediately. Preferably before Friday. But wanting something and being prepared to carry it are not always the same thing. There are responsibilities in my life now that a younger version of me might have wanted but would not necessarily have known how to handle. There are opportunities I appreciate differently because of how long they took to arrive. There are situations I can manage now because earlier disappointments quietly taught me something first.

Perhaps preparation does not always look like preparation while it is happening. Sometimes it looks like frustration. Sometimes it looks like starting again. Sometimes it looks like being told no. Sometimes it looks like watching somebody else receive what you prayed for. Sometimes it looks like an ordinary year when nothing particularly impressive seems to happen. Only later do you realise that roots were growing.

I think that is why I have come to appreciate the image of a seed beneath the soil. From above, nothing appears to be happening. There is only dirt. If you judged the entire process by what you could see, you might assume nothing was working. But underneath, something is becoming capable of surviving above ground. Roots first, then growth. We usually want the flower. God may be working on the roots.

We become impatient because we are looking for evidence above the surface, while God may still be strengthening what will have to hold us underneath it.

There are closed doors I understand differently now too. At the time, some of them hurt. I prayed for things that did not happen. I wanted opportunities that went somewhere else. I imagined futures that never became mine. Back then, I interpreted a closed door as evidence that something had gone wrong. Now I am not so sure. There are things I once desperately wanted that I can now look back on and quietly say, Thank God that didn’t happen. It is almost funny. The same person who once asked God why He wouldn’t give her something eventually thanked Him for refusing. Time has a sense of humour like that.

Sometimes what we call rejection while standing in front of a closed door looks remarkably like protection when viewed from several years away. Not every disappointment will eventually receive a neat explanation, and I know that too. Faith should not require us to pretend every painful thing suddenly makes perfect sense. Some losses remain losses. Some questions stay unanswered. Some chapters will probably never be understood completely in this life. But I have lived long enough to know that my understanding of a moment is limited by where I am standing. God sees farther than I do.

That sounds simple until you actually have to live by it.

There is a verse in Isaiah that says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” I used to read verses like that and think they sounded beautiful. Now I think they are also slightly uncomfortable because trusting that God’s ways are higher means accepting that mine might not always be right. And I like my plans. I make good plans. At least I think I do. But if every prayer in my twenties had been answered exactly as I requested, I sometimes wonder where some of those answers would have taken me.

Perhaps I would have entered doors I was not prepared to walk through. Perhaps I would have held onto people or situations simply because I was afraid of losing what was familiar. Perhaps I would have mistaken something convenient for something meant for me. There is no way of knowing, and maybe that is the point. Faith does not give us the ability to see every road ahead. It asks us to trust the One who can.

Looking back now, I can see moments in my life that make more sense from this distance. Opportunities arrived when I was better prepared for them. People entered my life at times when their presence mattered. Lessons I once resented eventually became useful in responsibilities I did not even know were coming. Some prayers took years instead of months, and when the answers finally came, I understood why receiving them earlier might not have been the gift I thought it would be.

That has changed the way I pray. I still ask God for things. I still have dreams. I still make plans, because faith has never meant sitting still and expecting heaven to organise everything while I do nothing. I work. I prepare. I hope. I try. But I am learning to hold the plans more loosely than I used to. There is a difference between having a plan and demanding that life obey it.

Maybe that is what I would most want my twenty-year-old self to understand. Stop measuring your life by what has not happened yet. Stop looking at somebody else’s timeline and using it as evidence that yours is wrong. Someone else’s answered prayer is not proof that God has forgotten yours. Someone else’s season is not a deadline for your own.

Comparison makes waiting unnecessarily cruel. It convinces us that being later means being less. We look at someone else’s career, relationship, house, family, success or happiness and immediately begin calculating the distance between their life and ours. But God does not write every story with the same sequence of chapters. Someone else’s chapter ten is not evidence that you have failed because you are still living chapter six.

If I could sit beside that twenty-year-old girl for a little longer, I think I would tell her not to rush through the years she considers unfinished. I would tell her that one day she will miss things she currently takes for granted. Some people will not always be there. Some places will change. Some ordinary routines will become memories. She should not spend all of today staring so intensely at tomorrow that she forgets to look around.

I would tell her to pray, but also to live while she waits. Laugh. Travel when she can. Take photographs. Spend time with the people she loves. Work hard, but go home and rest. Celebrate other people’s good news without assuming it has taken something away from her. Keep asking God for the things in her heart, but do not make happiness conditional upon receiving them.

Most importantly, I would tell her that waiting is still part of life. It is not the corridor outside the room where life happens. It is not wasted space between one blessing and another. Some of the person she will eventually become will be built there.

And perhaps she would still worry. Actually, I know she would. I know her too well.

Maybe she would nod politely, finish her coffee and go home to think about the exact same things again. Some lessons cannot be handed backwards through time. They have to be earned by living long enough to understand them.

Perhaps that is why I would not tell her how the story ends. Because my story has not ended either.

There are still prayers I am waiting on. There are still dreams whose timing I do not understand. There are still things I would like God to answer a little faster, if I am being completely truthful. Growing older has not turned me into someone who waits perfectly. I still become impatient. I still ask when. I still occasionally present God with plans that are suspiciously detailed.

The difference is that now I have evidence. Not evidence that everything will happen exactly as I want it to, because faith has never promised me that.

Evidence that I have survived unanswered questions before.
Evidence that closed doors did not end my story.
Evidence that delays sometimes carried gifts I could recognise only later.
Evidence that God remained present even during seasons when I could not understand what He was doing.

And maybe that is enough.

If my twenty-year-old self asked me one final time, But when will everything finally make sense? I think I would smile now.

Because I no longer believe everything has to.

Some things will make sense later.
Some may never make sense at all.
Some prayers will be answered differently from how I imagined.
Some dreams may change because I will change.

There will be detours, closed doors, beginnings I did not plan and endings I did not want. There will probably always be another part of life asking me to trust God without seeing the whole road.

But perhaps that is what faith was always supposed to be. Not knowing the ending and walking with Him anyway.

So if I could sit across from the twenty-year-old version of me today, I still would not tell her what happens next. I would let her keep her questions. I would let her dream. I would let her make her plans and learn, slowly, that God is allowed to rewrite them.

Then, before we finished our coffee, I would tell her the one thing I wish she had believed sooner: